Proceedings Paper

Automation of interferogram analysis is very important for successful application of all interferometric measurement techniques. In high-speed aerodynamics or experimental mechanics, complex noise-ridden fringe patterns frequently arise due to prevailing adverse environments. In conventional practice, only local information has been heavily utilized to reduce background noise or to correct phase information. Under these circumstances, the currently available techniques, that is, fringe tracking, phase-shifting, Fourier transform, and regression methods, confront difficulties in phase unwrapping and thus need substantial interactive manual operations. The developed rule-based expert system utilizes both global/regional and local information, and makes use of expert knowledge. It can thus provide a potential for more comprehensive automation in noise reduction and phase unwrapping. The developed expert system adopts a hybrid mechanism in a single package, that is, the low-level and high-level processings to produce an optimal solution in fringe analysis. The system can be coupled with any current interferometric reduction techniques, being based on the analysis of isophase contour lines.